Reallusion Character Design - Anaximander

Anaximander

For me this contest is all about learning to use Blender to clothe characters. As I progress I'll share what I learn and hopefully generate some discussion so others can help me as well.

I've pretty well decided to do a 1930's styled Super Villain that would fit into the Buck Rogers / Flash Gordon universe as portrayed in the movie serials of the time.  I like art deco and intend to incorporate it into the project.

Stay Tuned.

Anaximander

My character is titled "The warlord of Mars" and is themed as in the above post.
Initial concepts:




I'll be using blender and 3d-coat.  I have basic skills with blender and am a 3d-coat novice.

So far I've concentrated on getting crude and fast made items into character creator. I've had good luck but have had a few failures.

I had made a helmet in 3d coat, and it went in no problem. I then made some very slight changes and could not get it to load. I tried many different things but what finally worked was to replace the 3d coat materials in blender with a default material. That allowed the item to go into cc and you can then apply your 3d coat maps.

The same thing happened with a skirt and the same thing resolved the problem.

Here is a link to a script to delete those annoying vertex group nubs. 
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5DXvrt8x04CbVA3RDI3TkRJazg/view

Anaximander

This is a combination test post of learning to put images on this forum and a discussion of a little mystery I don't understand.

So. I'm busily learning to use 3d coat and decide to try a set of boots.

I decide to make one boot and mirror it in blender.

The mirrored boot has the normals pointing in so I recalculate them to the outside.



I bring them in to cc and I get this.



Not a big deal because I can simply check 2 sided.



But still annoying.

Any ideas anyone ?

Side note: This is what I did to get images to post.

Upload to a free hosting site like www.freeimagehosting.net.

 It will come back with an image code like  <a href="http://www.freeimagehosting.net/commercial-photography/"><img src="http://i.imgur.com/OtB92KK.jpg" alt="commercial photography locations"></a>

Pick out  the http://i.imgur.com/OtB92KK.jpg part and put that in the attach image dropdown.

Anaximander

This is the first piece I've done which I think is good enough to use.



I just painted in the rivets. They look ok from a distance but I may sculpt them in later.



My focus is about story-telling, so as long as it looks good in iclone I'm happy. But having said that,  part of this contest is about topology, a subject about which I know next to nothing. The above  photo is how 3d coat constructed the mesh.  I invite anyone who knows something about topology to suggest how it could be changed.

If i'm interpreting 3d coats numbers correctly, the helmet has 3460 quads and the spire has 2960. Too high ?

Anaximander

I've been busily learning to use 3dcoat and am fairly happy with the way my skills are improving. I'm fairly confident that I can make something that will look ok.

The biggest hurdle for me is going to be weight painting, something I've only messed with a little bit.
This is the sort of thing I am up against